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Friday, April 1, 2011

Mesa Man Documents Genealogy "Back to Adam"

I thought my readers would enjoy this news article from the Mesa Gazette:

1 April 2011-- At a press conference today, Mesa resident, James Tanner, 97 announced the completion of a lifetime goal; documenting his ancestry back to Adam. Tanner, who is a resident of the Happy Acres Care Center on East Broadway, showed off his document and files that take up most of his single room apartment. "I have been working on this project for over 60 years," Tanner indicated, "only recent advances in archeology and online digitized records from Google made all this possible."

Tanner indicated that the breakthrough in his research came when an anonymous benefactor enabled him to get a high speed Internet connection. Previously, all of his research had been on dial-up and he was afraid that he wouldn't live long enough to complete the project. He said translating the older records was also a challenge but several of the caregivers who were from Eastern European countries and South America helped him with the languages. Tanner said he works on the project most of the day, stopping only for dinner and an occasional Bingo game in the common room of the Care Center.

When questioned about how he could find enough records to complete such a project, he stated that many of his friends claimed to have their genealogy back to Adam and he thought it just might be possible to document the entire line. With the completion of his 4,359,232nd Family Group Record, Tanner said the job was essentially complete. Once he discovered Adam's will and probate record, the rest was pretty easy, he said. Adam's will, which Tanner states, has over 250 pages of descendants and is very difficult to read, was found in a recent set of documents added to Google's Book digitization project. Tanner also commented on the difficulty of reconstructing the records lost in the Flood. "Although, it is difficult to find some of the records," he relates, "after I found the land records for the Tower of Babel that pretty well solidified my research."

In his further comments, Tanner stated that he was waiting for FamilySearch, a large genealogical repository to "fix the problems with its New FamilySearch program" so he can upload his file. When asked his biggest challenges, he stated that finding enough floppy disks to back up my file was his biggest problem. "My new Pentium Four computer works just fine, but floppy disks are getting harder and harder to find and I am still having a hard time getting used to the new Windows 95 operating system." He stated that he was still comfortable with DOS and didn't see much need for Windows.

Actually, I know a real person who truly believes she has documented her family line unbroken (and unblemished) back to Father Adam. She even posted each name on her blog, with various and appropriate titles and references to royalty and/or outstanding social hierarchy, of course.

In the name of common decency her blog link shall remain modestly unnamed.